Watching Nick Day's Film Mindville Grow: A Slideshow

I'm sure I'm not alone when I confess that until a short while ago, when I heard people talk about "Indiegogo" I thought they were referring to some '80s girl band. The idea of a publicly funded platforms to raise money for a film seemed oddly obscure and I could not make heads or tails of the whole affair.

That was until filmmaker, writer and producer Nick Day took the time to explain it all to me and to walk me through the making of his latest project Mindville. Day is currently in the midst of his own Indiegogo campaign to bring Mindville to the level where it needs to be, so he and his team can create a film that will eventually be a major theatrical release. In past projects, Day explored the culture of spirituality, as in the beautifully shot Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela and his video documentary The Consciousness Chronicles. Now he steps a bit outside his comfort zone -- or seems to at first glance -- to make an animated film about the inner workings of our busiest organ: The brain.

I asked Day a few questions -- which accompany the first drawn storyboards for his project featured in the slideshow below -- about what it's like to raise money on a crowdfunding site, what he wishes to achieve from it and why he chose to make a film about a boy, a girl and our mind.

Nick Day's MIndville

Nick Day's MIndville

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Character Introduction

What do you plan to achieve with this fundraising campaign?Nick Day:Mindville is currently at the development stage. All movies require production design and storyboarding as an essential part of their creation. This campaign is about raising funds so we can hire one or more animation artists to create key art to a much higher level, to make storyboards of selected scenes and produce animatics. An animatic is a draft animation created from storyboard drawings and includes actors performing the script, a music soundtrack and sound design.
Developing these materials serves two vital purposes: The first is to move the project forward in a very practical sense, to evolve the visual aspects of the film and translate the screenplay into images. An animatic essentially brings the film to life for the first time, tests how a scene is working, and provides vital feedback to the creative team on how to make the final version of the movie.
The second equally valid purpose is to utilize these higher level materials to attract major producers, investors, agents and actors. Mindville is destined for a worldwide theatrical release, and requires high enough production values to appeal to cinema audiences.